Delivering an Omni-channel customer experience is a must for Digital Service Providers: Pt 2

Ari Banerjee, senior director Strategy, NetCracker

In order for operators to become a Digital Service Provider they need to undergo digital transformation which involves digital service portfolio and capabilities required by service providers to deliver those services to end customers.

Digital transformation involves focusing existing technologies or new investment in technology and business models to effectively engage consumers at every touch point in the customer experience lifecycle, says Ari Banerjee, senior director Strategy, NetCracker. Key steps which a successful DSP need to take in order to provide a unified cross channel customer experience are provided below:

Channel unification: Connecting every transaction to the brand should be mantra driving operators’ Omni-channel strategy. Customer information, their interaction behavior, marketing initiatives etc are all spread across different channels. It is critical to absorb and monitor all these channels as well as intercept and understand their behavior across social media platforms. Channel unification mechanism needs a unified orchestration layer which interacts across different channels of CSPs operation to tie together subscriber related information to deliver analysis and knowledge of customer behavior and interaction based on centralised business rules based platform.

A unified channel strategy should be able to provide complete, consistent product/service information available across channels and make it easy for customers to easily access it. Unification of inventory information and information from POS and store inventory solutions is also critical in order to provide real time stock availability information across all channels. Unified channel strategy should be able to holistically track customer activity across all channels, providing a single view of the customer.

Unified data management: Customer related data is spread across different BSS/OSS systems, network, channels, social networks etc. In order to create an up-to-date, accurate customer profile demands a unified data management strategy which rationalises data by removing duplication of subscriber data across multiple systems and also keeps customer data current by synchronising and updating data on a real-time basis. This customer data can be enriched with data from external sources for deeper understanding of customers and utilise customer information across all channels and systems.

Pro-active notification: Today’s customers want their CSPs to be pro-active regarding both commerce and care initiatives. They are demanding prior and pro-active notification of promotions, order and shipment status, potential disruption of service, service delivery status etc. It will also be beneficial for CSPs to proactively provide their customers who might have been comparing prices for a particular device online to proactively notify them when that device might be up for sale and the channel via which that might be available.

Contextual insight: Contextual intelligence is the ability to understand the uniqueness of customers, their circumstance, behaviors and preferences and convert that understanding into an opportunity for CSPs to stay competitive. Use of advanced analytics becomes critical in this regard as it helps to identify the context of these touch points and utilising historical and real-time data to predict customer behavior and determine where and when an action should take place. Advanced analytics acts as a major enabler for contextual intelligence in telecom, as it helps to navigate through the copious amounts of data to get a more in-depth, contextual profile of subscribers to understand factors such as customer preferences, channel behavior, usage patterns and predict their future behavior patterns.

Preventive care: Providing holistic customer experience depends on pre-emptive and automated approach to issue management as well as providing power to end subscribers so that they can control and manage their own services without having to call customer service. It is critical today to have assisted flows, guided answers and virtual assistance online and on mobile devices which can do a lot of call deflection, reduce cost and provide superior experience by being right at the fingertips of the subscriber. Deflecting calls to automated less expensive channels, providing contextual information to subscribers to resolve their problems and preventively solving subscriber issues before it impacts their service experience will provide operators with multi-dimensional benefits. This will help them enhance customer experience and also reduce average call handling time and support cost related operational expenditures.

The author of the blog is Ari Banerjee, senior director Strategy, NetCracker.

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